Liza George · Seattle, WA

Member of
Technical Staff
at Microsoft Robotics

Liza George smiling in front of a brick wall
Curious by nature.
Engineer by practice.

01 / Experience

From sustainable agriculture to physical AI, I like working where software meets something tangible.

Microsoft

Member of Technical Staff

Formerly Software Engineer · Aug 2025 – Present

Microsoft Robotics · MDQ · Office of the CTO

I develop AI agents on the Microsoft Robotics team, building capabilities for planning, tool use, and integration with Microsoft services and robotics models. I own features end to end, taking them from design and prototyping through implementation, testing, and release. Along the way, I author architecture decision records and learn from senior engineers through code reviews.

My work also includes implementing security and governance controls to our agentic platform, allowing for secure and trusted deployments. Additionally, I helped implement an agent-evaluation framework to compare frontier model performance on physical AI tasks.

I lead collaborations with internal teams and external partners, sharing sample applications, developer tools, and guides that make onboarding easier. I’ve also built reusable AI-assisted workflows for code review and technical documentation, and led internal knowledge-sharing sessions on engineering practices, agent governance, and emerging AI tools.

  • AI agents
  • Robotics
  • Evaluation
  • Developer experience

Earlier experiences

UIUC Teaching Assistant / Lead Course Assistant

I helped plan and administer courses, create and present lectures, and teach during office hours. Across seven semesters, I developed course materials and plans for hundreds of students each semester. I also led the rest of the course-assistant team, facilitating all-staff meetings and helping hire and supervise course staff.

Starting in Fall 2022, I mentored teams in CS222 (Software Design Lab), helping students plan semester-long projects and practice software-engineering fundamentals. I personally mentored four teams and was promoted to Lead Course Assistant in January 2023.

In Spring 2022, I was a course assistant for CS128H (Introduction to Computer Science II Honors), where I used Angular to maintain and add features to the course website and taught student teams Rust.

UIUC NCSA Research Intern

I was a part of the lab of Professor Kaiyu Guan, who is the Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center and is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In our research, we utilized satellite data, computational models, and machine learning techniques to develop more productive and sustainable crop practices.

I developed an online portal for farmers, enabling them to access their own crop data and analyze soil moisture data over time. To create this portal, I used Next.js, Google APIs for integrated maps and plots, and hosted the data on MongoDB.

I also collaborated with Assistant Professor Bin Peng, two Colombian social scientists, and the NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (LCLUC) project to map rural croplands in Colombia. The project used satellite imagery and machine learning to study cropland changes caused by conflict.

  • Next.js
  • Google Maps & Charts
  • MongoDB
  • Machine learning
Microsoft Software Engineering Intern

I created a framework to control robots with natural-language commands, demonstrated in simulation and on physical hardware. The team adopted and refined the framework after the internship.

I independently planned and built the framework, collaborating closely with the team on integration.

Microsoft Software Engineering Intern

For my project, I developed a robot-teleoperation application. I utilized WebRTC and the Azure Communication Services SDK to relay controls and camera feeds.

This project was a collaborative effort with another intern—we created the project codebase from scratch, made design decisions, and set our own project timeline. During this internship, I gained knowledge in networking, ROS 2, and C#/.NET. In my final review, I received positive feedback for consistently maintaining high code quality and demonstrating independence.

  • WebRTC
  • Azure Communication Services
  • ROS 2
  • C# / .NET
Uber Software Engineering Intern, UberSTAR

This was my first ever internship, and I learned a tremendous amount about software engineering! I was part of the Enterprise Billing team in the Money organization, where I first helped the team recover from a Code Yellow and then built an internal API for our operations team to query all U4B invoices. In the process, I learned how to work with Go, in a monorepo managed with Bazel, and then practiced using React to build my project’s interface. I also helped the on-call team and worked on documentation.

The API used Protobuf to query and sort billing invoices, backed by a real-time analytics database built in collaboration with another intern. I built the corresponding UI with React and GraphQL, incorporating direct user feedback. The resulting tool was easier to use and several times faster and more responsive than its predecessor.

Working in an agile development team also meant contributing to the support channel, product documentation, and resolving product outages.

Google Computer Science Summer Institute Scholar

Google’s Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI) Program was a selective four-week bootcamp for rising college freshmen. During the program, I used the p5.js library to practice my knowledge of JavaScript, learned from Google’s volunteer instructors and engineers, and attended workshops to learn how to be a successful teammate and engineer.

The program ended with a capstone project that I built and presented with my partner, where I used the p5.js library to replicate the arcade game Centipede.

02 / Projects

A few things I’ve built and can share, from hackathons and coursework to my first internship.

Hackathon · Feb 2023

Ligo

A website for conference, hackathon, and convention organizers and attendees to calculate the carbon footprint of their events.

Best Water, Food, Health, or Climate Hack — BoilerMake 2023

SvelteKit · Tailwind CSS · MongoDB

View on Devpost
Sentiment Analyzer project screenshots showing text analysis and a sentiment-over-time graph

Course project · Nov – Dec 2021

Sentiment Analyzer

A tool that can output the overall sentiment—positivity and negativity—of input text over time. I created a command-line interface for users to input either a CSV file of text and timestamps, or a Twitter username to analyze the sentiment of tweets over time.

Entirely programmed in Rust as part of Introduction to Computer Science II Honors. I implemented a multithreaded MapReduce algorithm to improve performance.

Rust · MapReduce · Multithreading

Explore the code
Assignment Aggregator output with course assignments arranged in a task-management interface

Course project / Software Development Fundamentals

Assignment Aggregator

A Python script that collates a student’s assignments from different online systems into their desired organizational tool. This was a group project for my university’s Software Development Fundamentals course.

I designed the output CSV format to be compatible with tools like Notion and Todoist, and created the interface used to standardize input data from various sources, including Canvas, PrairieLearn, and Moodle.

Python · CSV · Data integration

Redacted screenshot of the invoice query and sorting interface built during my Uber internship

Internship project · Summer 2022

Uber Invoice Explorer

An API and corresponding interface that allows an internal operations team to query and sort B2B invoices. I built the API in Go using Protobuf, and collaborated with another intern to connect it to his real-time analytics table.

I learned how to use React and GraphQL to create the Invoices Page interface that queries my API.

Go · Protobuf · React · GraphQL

Internship story

03 / Toolkit

Prioritizing continuous learning, even after university.

Languages

Python, C#, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C++, SQL

AI

AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), agent evaluation, frontier-model comparison, GitHub Copilot

Robotics

ROS 2, vision-language-action (VLA) model integration and evaluation

Application development

React, Next.js, .NET, GraphQL, Protobuf, MongoDB, WebRTC

Cloud & engineering

Azure Communication Services, OAuth, Docker, CI/CD, CodeQL

04 / Education

A computer science education that spans theory, systems, AI, and the responsibility that comes with building.

University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign

Master of Computer Science
B.S. in Computer Science

Joint B.S./MCS program · GPA: 3.79/4.00

Graduated with honors (B.S.)

Illinois Engineering Outstanding Scholarship

Coursework & campus life

Relevant coursework: Algorithms, Database Systems, Systems Programming, Probability and Statistics, Numerical Methods, Deep Learning for Computer Vision, Computer Security, Ethics, Advanced Distributed Systems, ML Compilers, Mathematics for AI.

Student organizations: Association for Computing Machinery, Society of Women Engineers, Students for Environmental Concerns.

Stanford University

Summer Sessions

GPA: 3.90/4.00

Relevant coursework: Client-Side Internet Technologies, Discrete Mathematics, Data Structures and Algorithms.

Continuing education · Feb 2026

AI Evals for Engineers & PMs

Maven · Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar

View the course

05 / Contact

Have an interesting idea, a shared curiosity, or just want to say hi? I’d love to hear from you.

Based in Seattle, WA.